PROVENCE AW19/20 is more than punk adjacent. We spent
an afternoon at home with Pietro Mattioli, poring over portraits of
club-goers he took during the last years of the 1970s at Club Hey,
Zürich’s first punk and new wave nightclub. These images are juxtaposed
with more recent shots of patrons at House Of Mixed Emotions,
a series of club nights in Zürichs Longstreet Bar.

Punk manifests in many ways, and apolitical it is not. A study
of the genre could not have been dedicated to paper without considering
its intersectional nuance. In two interviews, Big Joanie, the
Black-British feminist punk trio and Sissi Zoebeli of Thema Selection
discuss the inevitability of activist pursuit as marginalized people
in specific creative and temporal contexts. In conversation with
Anne Gruber, Ulrike Ottinger waxes nostalgic on her feminist and
decolonial education, as well as her seminal 1977 film, Madame X—
An Absolute Ruler. The two met at Ottinger’s home on Bodensee, at
the foot of the Alps.

Six postcards, conceived by Edgars Gluhovs, showing different
crops of an image of the long-missing Lord Lucan have been
scattered freely amongst the pages of this publication.
Some things you’ve got to work for, others simply drop into
your lap.

In the LITERATURE section of this punk-themed edition of
PROVENCE, writer, curator, publicist, and editor, Hans-Christian
Dany, offers a translated excerpt from his latest book, MA-1 Mode
und Uniform, which is dedicated to the bomber jacket. “Deception
and camouflage are part of the game when no one is supposed to
know all too well how anyone else pays the rent”. Overleaf, in a passage
from When Surface Was Depth (2002), London-based novelist
Michael Bracewell reflects on the relationship between art, counter-
cultures and subcultures, and their liquidation into a mainstream.

We have no less than three editorials in ART & FASHION, two
of which are dedicated to a single designer. Mikael Gregorsky shoots
Aganovich, avant-garde haute-couture, styled by Alessia Ansalone;
Kristina Nagel takes her lens to experimental designer Lou de Bètoly’s
latest collection, styled by our fashion editor Nina Hollensteiner;
lastly, Nadine Fraczkowski journeys to a small village near Düsseldorf
to capture Leila, a nineteen-year-old gymnastics enthusiast.

IN-HOUSE furthers our investigation into the nature of the
contemporary gallery, which we pursued in the previous two issues.
This time, we explore the phenomenon of in-house magazines
founded by galleries and art institutions. We speak with Lionel Bovier,
director of the MAMCO in Geneva, and Randy Kennedy, executive
editor of Ursula, Hauser & Wirth’s new publication, to gain
insight as to this recent art world industry trend.

To control which stories are and are not told is a great responsibility.
Kari Rittenbach offers a view from the other side of the desk, with
a distillate of her rejected pitches and unfinished articles—the stories
that never reached a platform beyond the inboxes of her editors.

Following this course, we’ve included REVIEW, a section
comprising contributions by artists, curators and critics who we invited
to challenge the format of the contemporary exhibition review.

On a trip to Hangzhou, China, we visited Li Lin, the art collector
and founder of JNBY. Meanwhile, in Beijing, curator Egija
Inzule spoke to Anna Eschbach and Antoine Angerer of I: project
space about their latest initiative, The Nightlife Residency, an interdisciplinary project focused on extracting the social potential of the
city’s club-culture through a contemporary art practice. Further
south, Wang Gongquan, proprietor of the Tsingpu Retreat offered
advice as to the tricky business of balancing a public civil rights activism
presence with a foray into the luxury hospitality business—
what’s a man to do?

Hannes Grassegger wears flip-flops and makes notes on Bitcoin
from Richard Branson’s island refuge, and over in Austria, our
deputy editor Olamiju Fajemisin questions Ei Arakawa and Sarah
Chow on the union of magic and concept from a medieval castle-
cum-summer school atop a hill in the middle of Salzburg. Read
all about it in REPORT.